How the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk

Elon Musk's use of his X platform to promote murderous voices of hate is unacceptable. One way of fighting back would be to try to break the co-ordination problem that underpins X's power.

A number of issues are raised by the spate of riots in the UK over the past couple of weeks, riots that include murderous attacks on mosques, on hotels thought to house people waiting for decision on their asylum claims, and on the police. But the behaviour of X, the social media platform now controlled by Elon Musk, is certainly one of them.

Since he took over Twitter and turned it into X, Musk has systematically dismantled its controls on abuse, hate speech, and incitement to violence. Anyone who has accidentally attracted the attention of those who enjoy inventing and promoting such things will know exactly what that means: as will anybody who has followed Sunder Katwala’s (@sundersays) courageous and patient noting of X’s consistent failure to deal with gross examples of abuse, incitement to violence, and hate speech.

It is not the purpose of this piece to explain why “but free speech” defences of X’s platforming of such speech do not work. But, put shortly, one answer to that defence is revealed by Musk’s own favourite metaphor of X as the “town square”, namely a forum for democratic debate. Forums for democratic debate always, and necessarily, have rules in order to ensure, as far as possible, that all can participate on equal terms (participation on equal terms being fundamental to any coherent account of democracy). Such rules will typically include restrictions on abuse and hate speech: because such speech intimidates, and is typically designed to intimidate, others from exercising their speech rights, and thus frustrates equal participation. As RH Tawney said, freedom for the pike is death to the minnow: and it is a thin and implausible conception of free speech that ends up allowing some citizens to use hate speech and abuse to intimidate, or just bore, other citizens into silence.

What, then, should be done about the fact that X, with its immense reach, is now behaving in this unacceptable way?

Of course, the UK (and the EU) have legislative options available to them. Ultimately X, and Musk, have to live within the law of the countries in which they operate. No matter how mighty they think they are, democratic governments are above them.

But legislation in this area is complex, takes time, and is most effective if co-ordinated accross a number of democracies rather than done unilaterelly. What could the UK Labour Government - and indeed all of us who find Musk’s conduct an intolerable intrusion on our democracy by an arrogant billionaire who knows nothing about our democracy and our laws and cares less - do now to start taking X, and him, down?

At the root of X’s power is a co-ordination problem, of a kind familiar in competition policy. Like all social media, its attractiveness as a platform largely depends on the extent to which everyone else uses it. You want to be on a platform where those whom you want to follow, and those whom you want to follow you, all are. As a result, the market can easily arrive at situation (an economist would call it an equilibrium) where a platform carries on dominating the market even though (a) there are better alternative platforms available and (b) everyone, or almost everyone, using the dominant platform thinks that those alternatives are better. The co-ordination problem is that, for any individual user, it make more sense to stay with the dominant platform with many more users (even though it is worse) than to move to the smaller, better, platform even though, if many individuals moved, they would all be better off.

However, one function of government is to solve co-ordination problems. And there is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms (BlueSky and Mastodon being the obvious contenders, neither being under the control of a Silicon Valley billionaire¹). That would in turn encourage all the users of X who currently use X to monitor government activity (journalists, businesses, many ordinary citizens) to open and use accounts on those competing platforms. That effect would be magnified if Labour MPs - and indeed all MPs and other public figures concerned about X’s conduct - did the same: and if government gave a lead, no doubt many others would follow.

I see no reason why the UK government should not do that - or at the very least, as an interim measure, start putting out all its material on another platform as well as on X, so that those who want to stop using X can follow government material just as well elsewhere. As far as I know, UK government bodies have no contractual obligation to carry on using X (X’s standard contracts with its users contain no requirement on those users to use X for anything). Since the UK government pays (I assume) nothing to X for its services, and would not pay anything to BlueSky/Mastodon either, the various rules around government procurement would not apply. And there is no general legal reason why the government should not use its power of leadership to shape the market away from entities who are too powerful and are abusing that power. Indeed, from a competition policy perspective, there every reason why government should use its power to give a lift up to X’s smaller competitors and challenge X’s market power.

But why not set an example ourselves. There is something that all users of X who care about defending democratic debate and opposing hate speech and racist abuse can and should now do: put your content on BlueSky or Mastodon, and if you stay on X at all, either use it entirely passively, or limit the content you post to signalling your content on other platforms, as a way of encouraging other users of X to switch over. To help resist X’s addictive tendencies, perhaps delete its app from your phone. That is what I am going to do from now on. Please join me.

1. See here for a description of BlueSky’s ownership.